Day Passes

GDP and R+ are pleased to present Sementara, a retrospective exhibition of the works by Ahmad Zakii Anwar from the Steve Wong Art Collection. On view at GDP Campus from 11 October 2026 to 10 January 2027, the exhibition is designed and curated by R+, GDP’s design researchers.  

Sementara celebrates the acclaimed artist Ahmad Zakii Anwar (b. 1955, Johor Bahru), lauded for his range of technical prowess in realism, to deliver his life-long inquiry on the meaning of existence. Visitors will have the rare pleasure of viewing up to 75 of Zakii’s works ranging from 1994 to 2013 from the Steve Wong Art Collection, brought together in what is the artist’s first solo exhibition since 2019. 

Zakii’s artistic practice has been marked by an admirable openness. A graduate in graphic design from Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Zakii continuously pushes the limits of his graphic vocabulary across various media, resulting in his highly reputed excellence in brushwork, printmaking and charcoal. Zakii’s long love for the cinema finds its way into his compositions, where his subjects are often given their place between light and shadow with much theatrics and skill.

Zakii generously offers the viewer a wide range of entry points into his otherwise weighty inquiry into the meaning of life. To achieve this, the artist simply articulates the universality of our human condition through a variety of subjects already within the reach of our lives: from our own body, still life, animals, and natural elements, to portraits, dancers, smokers, and urban dwellers. With that in mind, Sementara therefore invites visitors to frame Zakii's artistic exploration by reflecting on our own impermanence while simply prolonging one’s attention — a commodity in an era of fast-paced living. Visitors may witness Zakii’s extraordinary persistence in this exploration across six chapters marking the exhibition experience of Sementara.

R+ also invites all to experience Sementara through a series of supporting programmes in October 2026 through January 2027. Central to Sementara’s reading of Zakii is that, in spite of our impermanence, humankind is multifaceted; whether or not we pay attention to this fact draws all the difference. The programmes seek to open up these multifacetedness in their variety.

R+, GDP and GDP Campus 
www.gdparchitects.com https://www.instagram.com/gdparchitects/ https://www.instagram.com/_rplusss/ 
As a company of designers, GDP’s practice centres on honing and appreciating good craft, of which art forms an integral part. Its Kuala Lumpur home, GDP Campus, is the avenue where both the practice and discourse on good design take place, as bridged by its anchor community hub, Testing Ground. R+ spearheads GDP’s strategic research and branding through collaborations, events, publications, exhibitions and more. 

Steve Wong Art Collection (SWAC)  https://stevewongartcollection.com/ https://www.instagram.com/stevewongartcollection/ 
As a close collaborator of GDP, Steve Wong Art Collection (SWAC) seeks to promote art through its large collection of Malaysian and Southeast Asian works of art. Built by prolific collector Dr Steve Wong for over three decades, the collection comprises up to 1,000 artworks that encapsulate the breadth and depth of the artistic practice, psyche and multiple facets of society. Zakii’s masterly attention to details has long earned Dr Steve’s surgical admiration, a spark of friendship that began with the Smokers series in 1994.

Sementara is the third installation of SWAC at GDP Campus, designed and curated for the second time by R+.